How I ran my startup… from Russian prison
I am a cliché tech entrepreneur. I spend my days hanging out in California, pitching VCs, hiring engineers, reading HackerNews/AstralCodexTen and searching for product-market fit. The braggart version is that I went to Stanford, interned at Google, raised my first VC round from Sequoia, went through YCombinator, built at least one big company, and watch Silicon Valley feeling it is a comedy about my life as a tech startup nerd.
All this is to say — I am very, very far from the world where I get strip-searched and threatened with a 20-year prison sentence while handcuffed to a radiator in an old building near Moscow.
I’m also a Ukrainian citizen who grew up in Kyiv, which my parents had to flee recently. Spent time wondering whether my childhood photo albums would burn if our apartment gets blown up. This adds further trauma and uncertainty to my life this past year. On top of the usual startup anxieties.
This is going to be the first of many posts about everything from WTF happened; to ways in which Russian prison felt like Burning Man; to how I still managed to recruit, fundraise and work while this insane shit was happening; to lessons for entrepreneurial leadership that came out of it — of which there were surprisingly many.
Ok, so WTF happened?
Back in August I was flying from Zurich to Moscow. My main concern as I was walking out the airport was whether I will get a nice enough car for the long drive into the city. I threw my bag onto the customs x-ray and my life changed.
The customs agent started aggressively questioning me and asking me to explain my various medications. I suspect (can’t know for sure) it was the Ukrainian passport that provoked her. I was patiently explaining things and then she found a capsule of my US-physician-prescribed Adderall. Cheap asshole that I am, I bought the generic version. Which, I was surprised to discover, said “amphetamine salts” riiiiiight on the capsule.
Buy branded medications, kids!
Once I was associated with the phrase “amphetamine salts” they really started going through my stuff. And amongst my stuff were five semi-forgotten tabs of acid, with a very jovial picture of the Cat in the Hat from Dr Seuss on them.
In hindsight, I would have been better off eating both that Cat and his Hat. Would have been a bad trip that lasted eight hours. Instead I got a bad trip that lasted eight months and could have gone eight years.
At that point I was too shell-shocked to really do anything beyond messaging a bunch of friends for help. I couldn’t breathe properly. I suddenly developed rather extreme heart arrhythmia of the kind I never felt before. Stupid shit like “what kind of car I will drive off in” became… rather unimportant.
Anyway, once the Cat in the Hat came out, there were about a dozen people searching me in all kinds of ways in the green-corridor of Domodedovo airport. And they spent approximately nine hours writing up descriptions of my various supplements and deciding whether my Vitamin D was more of a “round yellow pill” or an “oval-shaped yellow pill”.
As anyone who has read this blog before knows, Mr. Biohacker travels with a lot of pills.
You know these grimy metal surfaces where all your stuff gets dumped out when you forget to take out your water bottle at the airport? I slept on it that night.
In the meantime they sent my acid tabs to their lab. The lab — points for honesty — said “we don’t know how to measure how much of the drug is there, so let’s just assume it is pure LSD, say 70,000 micrograms.” Even though a cursory Google search will quickly tell anyone that that is hundreds of times more than what is actually there in five tabs.
And, of course, that was enough to say “looks like this guy is a major drug smuggler who should be put in prison for 20 years and because he is also Ukrainian we will not give him bail and just send him to jail immediately.” I have documents which say literally this.
Eight-month-long trip
This was the start of an eight-month-long adventure. I guess calling it a “trip” is especially appropriate here.
I spent a month in jail being shuffled between different cells. One was like Shawshank Redemption — cigarette-trading and inmates breaking through walls at night. Another was like a luxury hotel — kosher food options, manchego with black truffles and a gym with a ping-pong table. There was a moment when I was stuck in a cage-on-wheels (автозак) peeing into a bottle and wondering whether I’ll be able to kill myself properly if I actually get imprisoned for 20 years. Speaking of killing, there were literal murderers in there who faced much shorter jail sentences than me with my five tabs of Dr. Seuss.
The variety of emotions was pretty incredible.
I then spent seven months house-arrested in Moscow — ankle monitor and all. Kept working on my startups — fundraising, recruiting, customer development, executive coaching. Went through serious depression at the same time, which my friends and family helped me overcome. And went through some of the most major psychological breakthroughs of my life, and much re-evaluation of what I consider valuable.
Most of this was very painful at the time. And looking back I feel it changed me in very positive ways, made me a better leader, strengthened my relationships with my family, my friends and my co-workers. Rearchitected my feeling of purpose in life. The whole experience makes me believe much more in humanity and humans, and even less in the institutions we have today.
In the process I had time to think, reflect and start Curiosity, a cool new kind of organization to drive transformative advances in human health. That is both my life-long transhumanist passion, and something I believe will change society for the better, which society sorely needs right about fucking now. I’m also posting about it today here if you’re interested.
I am fine now
A few days ago I finally got off with a slap on the wrist. It became obvious to everyone from the judge to the prosecutor that I am not some major commercial drug smuggler and just someone who made a careless mistake, plus had some legally-prescribed medication. So they decided to go easy on me. I was worried I’d get screwed for my Ukrainian citizenship given that by then the level of mutual hatred in politics and media was very high, but to their credit that did not happen. For which I am grateful.
I am fortunate to be in this position. In prison I met people who were put away for years because they couldn’t afford the lawyers and expensive suits that make you look good in court. I remember one guy who I gave a bunch of my clothes because he had nothing to deal with the Russian winter and no relatives to send him anything.
Anyway. Now I can talk about all this publicly, and will dig into all of the above in future posts.
Next time I think I will talk about what it was like when the Russia-Ukraine conflict started. I am a Ukrainian who grew up in Kiev, and I am also a Russian born in Siberia, and I am also an American educated at Cornell and Stanford whose whole worldview is shaped by Silicon Valley. On Feb 24 it felt like different parts of my life suddenly decided to murder each other. And here I am sitting in Moscow with an ankle monitor and unable to do anything.
Why I am writing about this publicly
I actually feel very, very vulnerable about writing this and sharing it with others. Most of all, I worry that nobody will care. After all, the world has plenty of more important shit to worry about some personal trauma of mine, important though it is to me.
But I’m still writing it because I want other people to feel more encouraged to share their own difficulties. And to find the upsides and learnings and positives when shitty situations happen to them.
If at times it feels like I am trying to be overly boastful about this positive reframing, that’s because I am. It helps me get over the trauma, I guess.
P.S. While I aspire to learn to be independent of what other people think, I am definitely not there yet. So pls like and share with others if you feel they will find it interesting ;)
